I never intended to become a sports writer, even though I was always very much into sports. Writing and sports existed in different compartments of my life, and rarely did they intersect.
While in college, I assumed my literary career would go something like this: I’d write short stories that, after a period of collecting increasingly generous rejection letters, would be published in small journals and lit mags until I’d eventually graduate to novels. I’d die a relative unknown, only to have my work rediscovered by some plucky young English major named Beatrice or something and ultimately I’d be heralded as a great genius. (I’m still banking on that last part.)
I started on those tracks. I wrote short stories that for the most part (but not always!) got rejected, but after pouring a ton of work into stories that earned me exactly zero dollars USD and were read by approximately three (3) people, I ditched the roadmap and started firing off emails to any website that would have me, keeping a personal blog on the side. The first place that gave me a shot was Sherdog, a mixed martial arts site I frequented. They paid me in actual money, edited my work, and most importantly wanted me to come back regularly. Six years later I still happily write for Sherdog.
Something unexpected happened, though. I naturally started to read more sports writing so I could learn from people who did it better, and I discovered a world of literature I had never known existed. Sports were a powerful way to understand life, from geopolitics to race and culture to that stranger, more ineffable moving target professorial types like to call “the human condition.”
Perhaps the most important discovery for me was The Best American Sports Writing anthology that came out every year. As soon as I discovered it I devoured it, reading the 20ish selections republished in it each year and combing through the pages in the back of the book that listed notable selections, stories that didn’t quite make the cut but were close, or maybe would have made it with a different guest editor. I took note of the names of writers and publications and started following their work. It exposed me to a world of smart, challenging, funny, ambitious and artful writing about sports.
BASW made me feel like I wasn’t a lesser writer for writing about sports. It gave me permission to try and write beautifully about them.
This year’s edition came out earlier this month, and unfortunately it is the final installment (with its current publisher) after 30 years of publication — 75 if you count the Best Sports Stories series that preceded it.
I had always hoped to one day write something good enough to get republished in its pages, and hopefully that opportunity will still be possible. If not, I’m proud to have an essay listed in the back of this year’s book as a Notable Selection.
For further reading, here are some of my favorite pieces of sports writing:
13 Ways of Looking at Greg Maddux by Jeremy Collins
The Cruelest Sport by Joyce Carol Oates
Sea of Crises by Brian Phillips
Federer, Both Flesh and Not (published in the NYT as “Roger Federer as Religious Experience”) by David Foster Wallace
The Bittersweet Science: Fifteen Writers in the Gym, in the Corner, and at Ringside (anthology)
Favorite reads from October
The Island That Humans Can’t Conquer by Sarah Gilman in Hakai Magazine
US servicemen stationed on St. Matthew during the Second World War got a more thorough sampling of the island’s winter extremes. In 1943, the US Coast Guard established a long-range (Loran) navigation site on the southwestern coast of the island, part of a network that helped fighter planes and warships orient on the Pacific with the help of regular pulses of radio waves. Snow at the Loran station drifted up to around eight meters deep, and “blizzards of hurricane velocity” lasted an average of 10 days. Sea ice surrounded the island for about seven months of the year. When a plane dropped the mail several kilometers away during the coldest time of year, the men had to form three crews and rotate in shifts just to retrieve it, dragging a toboggan of survival supplies as they went.
Seven Months of Solitude by Michelle Broder Van Dyke in Slate
While having no tourists on Oʻahu has felt a little like going back in time, it has been difficult to enjoy the rare solitude. People are sick and dying. Hawaiʻi has some of the highest unemployment rates in the nation—mostly because tourism accounted for a quarter of the economy. I worry about what might happen to my hometown. Hawaiʻi’s infamous high cost of living had already caused population loss over the last three years, as people moved to the mainland for better job opportunities—and now that’s going to accelerate. It didn’t help reading a tactless article in the New York Times about a California family “stuck” at their mother’s empty vacation home in Hawaiʻi, while reading the local news that Pacific Islanders and Filipinos are being disproportionately affected by COVID-19 and that people are noticing more homeless encampments in Honolulu. Hawaiʻi may look like paradise, but it isn’t always for the people who live here.
Americans Are Losing Sight of What Fascism Means by Shadi Hamid in The Atlantic
Words matter because they help order our understanding of politics both at home and abroad. If [Senator Tom] Cotton is a fascist, then we don’t know what fascism is. And if we don’t know what fascism is, then we will struggle to identify it when it threatens millions of lives—which is precisely what is happening today in areas under Beijing’s control. Chinese authorities have tightened their grip on Hong Kong. And while the world watches, they are undertaking one of the most terrifying campaigns of ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide since World War II in Xinjiang province, with more than 1 million Muslim Uighurs in internment camps, as well as reports of forced sterilization and mass rape.
For morality to operate, moral proportion is required. Unfortunately, the Trump era has badly damaged our ability to see what’s right in front of our noses.
Joe Biden Won’t Fix America, but Booting Trump is a Good Place to Start by David Roth in theLAnd Mag
National politics is what it is: shitty television for tired old people to watch, the peg for innumerable cheesy grifts, the single worst industry on earth. But politics itself happens elsewhere, everywhere, under and over all the rest of this and all the time. Joe Biden won’t change anything about American life beyond stripping the Trumpian crassness and cruelty and chaos from its day to day; this is something like the fundamental promise of his campaign. It is a shamefully, laughably insufficient response to a strident American fascism, and a breathtakingly cynical one; while the reality of that fascism is reason enough to cast a vote against it, Biden has been careful to promise nothing beyond that. They’re betting that it’s still enough to earn a vote, and on balance, it absolutely is.
I also really enjoyed this interview with Don DeLillo.
October’s books
Shark Drunk: the art of catching a large shark from a tiny rubber dinghy in a big ocean by Morten Strøksnes
It’s hard to classify just what this book is, other than endlessly entertaining. On the surface it’s a story about the author, a Norwegian journalist, and his friend trying to catch a Greenland shark, a nightmarish arctic fish which causes those who eat it to become inebriated (see: the title of the book). But it is also a history of the region and the ocean and arctic myths and exploration and, ultimately, a memoir of friendship, aging and change.
Today, whenever a shark attacks someone, the incident is like an echo of a distant, primordial time when we didn’t yet dominate the world with our superior technology. In a matter of seconds, our control over the world is wiped out. Suddenly we are not the one who kills but the one getting killed. The likelihood that this would happen to someone is almost nonexistent. But we fear landing down there in the cold deep, surrounded by creatures that will devour every last scrap of us, until everything about us disappears.
In the Seat of a Stranger’s Car by Beau Flemister
A novel about a valet in Waikiki who discovers an abandoned child in the trunk of a car at work. It’s a fun read with lots of riffs on valet life — anyone who has worked in customer service will knowingly nod along — and island life in general. It’s a fun story and a breezy read, but there are sections of fine writing sprinkled throughout, and a lot of heart underneath it all that makes it better than just a good beach read.
Don’t be stingy, my island home. Give him all the love you gave me, Oahu, in all your strange beauty. Give him fat rain in blinding sunlight, showers that pass in seconds, the ones that make no sense whatsoever. I swear, before the summer’s over we’ll have done all of this, and maybe even leave some left over for the next.
Reading now
Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
I’ve read two Robbins books before — Skinny Legs and All, which I thought was incredible, and Villa Incognito, which I thought was decent but didn’t stick the landing. But even when Robbins isn’t quite executing the fullness of his ambition, his sentence-level writing is always a delight.
Thrown by Kerry Howley
Speaking of good sports writing, this is one of the first books that attempts to capture MMA in a sophisticated, literary way (MMA is only a few decades old now, much of which occurred on the fringes of the sports world). Howley is an excellent writer in general, and so far I’m really enjoying it.
October writing
For Honolulu Civil Beat, I wrote about why more high-needs students should start coming back to school on campus, and why SURFER Magazine going out of business after 60 years is such a loss.
For Sherdog, I wrote about the problems that Justin Gaethje posed to reigning champ Khabib Nurmagomedov. Khabib went on to buzzsaw Gaethje in their fight, but technically my prediction that if Khabib was ever going to lose it was going to be to Gaethje still holds up, since Khabib retired afterword. Hurray for technicalities! Unless, of course, he un-retires…